the second hand unwinds
by Aya-kun Rose
Summary: This is just one of those stories that leads with an unexpected twist, ends in the way everyone saw coming, and leaves its beginning unwritten. In that order.


**WE THIEVES OF TIME**

* * *

Your skin like dawn

Mine like musk 

One paints the beginning

of a certain end. 

The other, the end of a

sure beginning.

 **Passing Time - Maya Angelou**

* * *

PART I.a

 **Canyon City, Yukon Territory - 1902 - Winter**

It's cold. Cold enough almost to stop a speedster in his tracks. Even so, it's not the sub-zero conditions that stall Eobard's pace. The natural contrarian in him refuses to rush this, preferring to take the long way round to meet fate - a fate, at long last, of his own choosing.

Ever since he dropped out of the time stream into this frozen frontier wilderness, a perverse sense of pleasure has been crackling across his nerve endings, every inch of him a livewire. It's not unlike the high-octane punch of the speed force firing through his veins. Not _better than_ , not by a long shot, but it's intoxicating and heady and powerful all the same.

For the first time in a long, long time, Eobard Thawne has no idea what's about to happen. For the first time in his entire life, perhaps, he is acting on a decision he has made for himself, without the guiding hand of destiny pointing the way. Can he be faulted for wanting to savor such a precious novelty?

He turns inland from the whitewater rapids of Miles Canyon and follows the trail south through a copse of thin, bare aspens, which stretch skeletal towards a slate gray sky. They stand solemn and still like pallbearers to the hollowed-out carcass of the gutted township ahead, all sunken roofs and gaping windows, the wind whistling a funeral dirge through the bones of this ghost town.

The implacable forward motion of the industrial revolution will overrun countless frontier towns such as this before all is said and done. The arrival of the railroad signed Canyon City's death warrant, siphoning the life force out of what had otherwise been a bustling settlement and diverting human history a tad north to what will become the Yukon's capital (and only city), leaving this one to wither right off the map.

Eobard's not one to judge; as a seasoned time traveler, he's learned to remain objective about events that take place centuries before his own timeline begins. Besides, the town, abandoned, and the climate, extremely unforgiving, provide a lonesome environment suited exactly to their needs.

His heart absolutely and completely does not jump into his throat when he crunches down onto the frost-crusted main street and sees the warm lamplight streaming out from the windows of the former Canyon City Hotel farther on up the road.

Eobard keeps his boots moving forward through the snow at an even pace, using all his self-control to do so, relishing the final few minutes of uncertainty and freedom before he opens that door and discovers what Barry Allen - and not fate, for a change - has in store for him.

(Also, he's fairly certain these borrowed period clothes would be reduced to smoldering scraps if he attempted to run flat out to the door. The dawning 20th century does not have the technology; they cannot rebuild them.

For a brief, insane second, he imagines Barry's reaction to a naked Eobard Thawne gracing his doorstep. He's lucky he has the subzero temperatures to blame for his ruddy cheeks.)

Taking a moment more under the wind-shredded hotel awning to revel in the luxury of second first impressions, cocooned in a winter silence only disturbed by the murmur of the White Horse rapids and an icy gale slicing overhead, Eobard calmly wraps his hand around the rusted door latch and lets himself into the hotel.

A welcome warmth greets him as he quickly slides into the small front room and closes the door firmly behind him. From the look of it, the hotel's lobby had also served as a saloon, complete with a short counter running down the length of the left-hand wall and a pair of rustic plank booths set into the wall opposite. Presumably, these booths had sported table tops in the saloon's heyday, but these have been roughly torn out by scavengers most likely, and the warped stock shelves behind the bar are dusty and bare.

He doesn't see Barry at first. But there are snow-damp boots by the door, and a painfully anachronistic S.T.A.R. Labs branded space heater humming away atop the counter's peeling lacquer.

In the back right corner, beside a door that leads deeper into the hotel, there's a much more period-appropriate fire crackling inside the sooty black belly of a cast iron parlor stove. In the space between the stove and the farthest booth, a bonafide grizzly bear skin rug hugs the floorboards, and sprawled out on this monstrosity, cuddled up in a CCPD hoodie and using his balled up parka as a pillow, is the one and only Barry Allen.

Barry's got a thin paperback held aloft, but this sinks to his chest when Eobard spots him. Neither man says a word, and Eobard's excuse is the way his throat has closed up at the sight of idol-rival-frenemy tipping his head back to peer across the room with firelight in his eyes. By everything that is holy, he was not ready for this.

"Eobard," Barry says, and the name rolls almost too casually from his lips in a way that is painfully perfect, "You're late."

He says it like it's his favorite joke, like it means more than it does. Those upside-down eyes squeeze to joyous crevasses deep and dark with fathomless humor. The room feels suddenly far too warm.

Eobard responds to this with the harsh sound of him clearing his throat, and follows that up with the self-conscious business of divesting himself of top hat and gloves and fur-lined overcoat and the like.

"The train from White Horse was delayed due to difficult weather conditions and the rail company almost postponed the return trip until next week. You're lucky I'm here at all." He detects a note of petulant defensiveness in his own voice that he's not proud of, but he chalks it up to the combative nature of their relationship to date. He leans into the curve and presses the offensive. "Of course, I could have just run straight here, if only preserving the sanctity of the timeline didn't happen to be chief among my concerns."

Eobard side-eyes the space heater's sunburst logo hard to make his point, but Barry just laughs.

"It's not like I can't clean up after myself," Barry retorts, waving the paperback as if it were a suitable piece of evidence to support his argument. "Last thing I want is a time wraith showing up to crash the party."

Meddling with the timeline is fraught with such sobering and unpleasant considerations, and Eobard's flickering hope about the immediate future gutters at the prospect. He licks his dry lips and watches the dust pile up as he sweeps a finger down the bar top's pitted surface.

"What are you reading?" he changes the subject, his voice low.

Something of a cagey look supplants Barry's easy grin. He rolls fluidly upwards into a seated position, shifting around on the grizzly skin to face Eobard the right way up for the first time. His thumb never leaves the crook of yellowed pages, like he's loath to lose his place. The hood of his sweatshirt falls to his shoulders and he paws a bit at his cowlicks with his free hand before leaning back to prop himself up with his fingers tangled deep in the thick fur.

"Seeing as you know so much about me from the history books, I might have taken the liberty of some future-reconnaissance of my own."

Eobard's lips twitch. "I'm flattered," he says wryly but meaning it all the same. "And the sordid details you uncovered lead you to a little light reading?"

Barry squints, that crooked sunbeam smile breaking across his face like the dawn. "You made the front page once by publishing a white paper outlining how the Aristotelian concept of poetic diction could be applied to quantum theory."

"And you believe everything you read in newspapers?" Eobard asks, adjusting the high, starchy collar of his gentleman's costume. His ascot seems to be suffocating him all of a sudden. "You of all people, I suppose you would."

"They even printed the white paper itself as a special addition," Barry continues, brow going stern with mock gravitas, "Riveting stuff. Your propositions were very compelling."

Eobard sighs, ducking his head and flourishing a hand in equally affected acceptance of the complement. "The product of sheer boredom and rebellious teenage spirit. Ms. Cotsis' Advanced English class was not nearly as challenging as she believed. I hope you didn't waste your time on any more of my erstwhile endeavors."

His eyes are sharp on the small motions Barry is making as a clear preamble to inviting him to a seat on the bear skin. As the parka-pillow is shoved aside, Barry tilts the cover of the book towards Eobard, his handy bookmark still firmly wedged between the pages.

"Just a second-hand poetry book my mom picked up at a thrift store once," he explains, "I was afraid of looking uncultured next to a bonafide student of literature such as yourself, Professor."

There's now an Eobard-shaped vacancy on the rug in front of the fire and Eobard knows how to capitalize on an opportunity when he sees one.

With a mix of suave confidence and endorphin-rich recklessness, the same kind of tantalizing what-if electricity thrumming through him as he had experienced on the cold lonely walk into town, Eobard drops himself to Barry's side and indulges in his wildest dreams.

"As if anything could ever make me think less of you, Barry Allen," he all but purrs, laying a hand on Barry's narrow chin in a way that would have been impossible in any prior context. When Eobard kisses him, it feels exactly as though all the time in the universe is at his command, infinite possibility distilled down into this singular golden moment.

The subarctic wind shrieks over the splintered roofs and the fire sputters from the draft down the stove pipe. Eobard almost misses the quiet, helpless noise Barry makes in the back of his throat.

Instantly the gilt tarnishes over and Eobard goes as cold as the abandoned winter wasteland and his heart seems to stop beating in his chest.

One of the benefits of super-speed is the extended time frame a speedster has to think and react to the relatively sluggish goings-on occurring around them in real time. That's why even though it's probably only a span of seconds, to Eobard it feels like an eternal nightmare; how horrifyingly slowly he seems to detach himself from Barry, how chilling it is to spend a lifetime staring at Barry's blank, neutral expression.

His heart hasn't stopped at all, it's just slowed to a comic ice age crawl, the bone-shaking pound of it reverberating in his ears only once an eon. A billion galaxies are born in flame and wink out in the frozen, silent void in the time it takes him to fully consider the depth of his mistake.

"Eobard," Barry says, and time resumes with all the finesse of a smoking locomotive barreling down a mountain pass.

Barry hasn't moved a muscle since Eobard invited himself into his personal space, but now a cloudy concern has settled on his face, though perhaps that's an improvement over the utter non-reaction he'd had to Eobard's advance.

"I obviously misread the situation," Eobard says tightly, "I'm only meta-human, after all." He shifts to get his feet under him - and look at him, farcical in spats and waistcoat, some kind of gentleman clown all dressed up and ready for his pie in the face - but Barry's quick hand on his arm stays him from running straight out of this century.

"No, it's my bad," Barry insists, his hand dropping back to the bear skin when Eobard's knee-jerk grasp on the Speed Force diminishes, "It's been a while since I had to explain to anybody, and I didn't want to assume that it was something I needed to state up front."

His one eye scrunches up into an apologetic grin and he palms the back of his neck in that endearing (infuriating) way of his. "One of the things you probably didn't learn about me from the history books is that I'm asexual?"

Eobard Thawne, celebrated genius and criminal mastermind, blinks at Barry like a dullard. "Ah."

"Yeah," Barry nods. "Surprise."

A thin smile plays on Eobard's lips as he tries to tuck this new information into the matrix of Things He Knows About The Flash. "So you're comfortable meeting me in a romantic fire-lit greeting card of a setting, but you're not comfortable with me kissing you."

Barry's hand falls Freudianly to his mouth and Eobard finds enough common decency within him to tear his eyes away. "Well. It's not that it makes me uncomfortable - I can see where we are, and you didn't misread _anything_ \- I just don't have the natural instincts to respond to that kind of … thing ... the way someone else might."

For a moment Eobard doesn't have a response to this revelation. Then something slightly caustic rises and drips bitterly from his tongue. "So it doesn't count as cheating on Mrs. West-Allen if there's no sex, is that it?"

He naturally expects Barry to take the defensive or to be riled into meeting this confrontation head-on, and they share an unnaturally long second observing the glint of firelight off his wedding band, but the surprises don't stop coming as Barry relaxes with a carefree laugh.

"Dude," he says, side-eyeing Eobard with gentle disapproval, "isn't polyamory a thing in the twenty-second century?"

Eobard closes his eyes and runs his teeth over his bottom lip, staving off the lingering panic and disappointment in exchange for acceptance of this sudden swerve off the tracks. He tries to anchor himself with perspective; this is what he wanted, wasn't it? To experience the novelty of the unexpected?

"I suppose I should have expected as much from a Millennial," he finishes his thought aloud. "The Flash: polyamorous asexual."

Eobard cracks an eye open and catches Barry shaking his head with a relieved smile. "For real though, don't you have these things in your time?"

Eobard shrugs, uncoiling his restless legs towards the fire and leaning back on both his hands. Settling in. "The concepts, sure. Your era's incessant need for labels, I'm happy to report, went the way of the dodo a while back."

"Huh," Barry rejoins, considering. He matches Eobard's sprawl, although his right hand is still faithfully entwined with that beautifully archaic paperback that won't be printed for another hundred years.

"So we're good though, right?" Barry's question isn't even half-formed before Eobard starts nodding his head slowly, definitively.

"My previously imparted sentiment remains intact," he says, ignoring the little flip his heart gives. Funny how the admission, stripped of its red-blooded ulterior motive of the moment, now makes him feel vulnerable, like he's a little kid again, peering up at his hero from the cool and vast expanse of his shadow.

Only this hero isn't some unreachable myth anymore - this is the one and only Barry Allen, alive and warm and real and boldly scooting closer so that they sit shoulder to shoulder the way equals might. The way lovers (or, at the very least, frenemies with open-for-discussion benefits) might.

Eobard clears his throat and grabs onto the here and now with both hands. "The way I see it, Barry Allen, we have a fire, we have a _beast_ of a rug, and we have all the time in the world. I think you're going to have to start reading me poetry before I embarrass myself again."

Barry's eyes twinkle with a special kind of light. Beyond the walls of their hideaway, the wind blows relentlessly through the frozen canyons, and the river tumbles headlong over the rapids, but time itself crystallizes, silent and glacial, on behalf of two speedsters and however many moments they can together conspire to steal. 

PART I.b

 **Canyon City, Yukon Territory - 1903 - Summer**

With the Waverider nestled within the safety of the deserted alpine foothills, the intrepid away team picked their way cautiously down the weedy main street of the ghost town, peering into dark broken windows and ignoring the wind's ominous whispers rustling through the aspens guarding the trail behind them.

"This is the right time and place, boys," Sara said, looking up from the blipping chronograph to squint through the pale northern sunlight at the sagging skeletons of the ruins. It was hard to tell what they might be hiding under all the moss and rot.

A sudden banging clatter drew her suspicious attention over to one of the larger buildings, but it was just Ray heaving a fallen weather-bleached sign up against the side of what was now identified as the town's hotel-slash-saloon.

"Are we sure?" Ray was squinting as well, stepping back and brushing off his hands. "Seems a little rustic for Thawne's tastes."

Stein sniffed, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to ward off the rising dust. "You'll remember, Raymond, that Eobard Thawne was - or _is_ , I unfortunately must say - a man of many hidden facets. For all we know, he might have found such a setting, er … quaint."

"He must have been one hell of a chameleon," Nate interjected, idly testing the latch of the hotel door. The whole thing broke off in his hand. "If he was able to keep his cover as Harrison Wells for as long as he did, what with a half dozen geniuses watching his every move from over his shoulder."

"You have a knack for making compliments difficult to accept, Dr. Heywood," Stein murmured to himself behind his handkerchief. Nate didn't hear him, too busy off-loading the rusted door latch into a clump of wild flowers pushing sunnily up through the boards of the sidewalk.

Ray came around the side of the hotel, shrugging like a defensive toddler. "They don't put out PSAs about how to spot the tell-tale signs of a time-traveling body-snatching mad scientist or anything, you know."

Sara cocked an eye at the chronograph and then gave the dusty road another once-over. Nothing to be seen hiding in the shadows - so far.

"Settle down, kids. Let's just find whatever it is Future-Cisco sent us here to find so we can get back to tracking our version of Thawne before he gets his hands on the Spear." She stepped lightly up to the boardwalk between Ray and Nate, while Stein shuffled after her as though wary of straying too far from the group.

"Ray, Martin, you're looking for anything that strikes you as something that Thawne could have left behind. Nate, you're looking for anything that doesn't fit the time period. Future-Cisco said there were twenty-second century energy signatures coming from this location, so it's probably tech, but we won't know for sure until we find it." She glanced over her shoulder. "Nice work, He-Man. You plan on deconstructing the whole place?"

This last piece was said in response to Nate's discovery of the hotel door's equally dilapidated hinges. He grunted as he set the newly liberated door off to one side.

"Ladies first," he said as if he hadn't just ripped the door bodily from the frame.

"Question," Ray piped up, ducking through the doorway after Sara as she disappeared into the dingy remains of the hotel, "How do we know Future-Cisco is right? Or even that he's telling the truth, for that matter? What if we're walking into a trap?"

Sara spun on him in the dusty darkness - most of the room's light came from the cracks in the roof - jabbing the center of his broad chest with the chronograph. "You really think now is a good time to be having these questions, Ray?"

He rubbed at the spot where she poked him, frowning. "Well, yeah, I guess. No one else had brought it up yet."

Sara held back a sigh. "Just assume, at all times, that you're walking into a trap, and then you won't have to wonder about it, okay?" She flicked a finger around the room. "Now spread out and help me look for whatever it is Thawne left here."

Ray's frown melted into something of a pout, and he raised a stiff hand in a small salute of acknowledgement. Sara turned to move deeper into the dim space, partially to let the guys filter in behind, but mostly to hide her fond smile.

The light from the street dimmed as Nate and then Stein, the latter still breathing through his hanky, passed through the gaping entryway. Ray turned and edged back behind the bar, looking dutifully under shelves for the boogeyman's hidden treasure.

"My question is," Nate said, crossing the length of the room towards Sara, "if Thawne was erased from reality - his current existence notwithstanding - then how was he able to leave anything behind at all? Shouldn't it never have happened in this timeline?"

Sara stepped back into the corner as he leaned past her to try his luck with the inner door. It didn't disintegrate at his touch this time and he poked his head into the far room for a moment.

"Well we're talking about the Thawne that originally traveled back in time and altered the course of history to begin with," Ray was saying when Nate ducked back into the main room, "Thawne-prime, as it were. All of the things he did or had happen to him before that juncture would remain intact in that original timeline. Or am I wrong, Dr. Stein?"

He leaned over the dusty countertop, scratching his head. The uncertain wood shifted under his weight.

Stein cleared his throat, tentatively dropping the handkerchief an inch or two. "Yes, I believe you're on the right track, Raymond. Cisco and I discussed the matter briefly some time ago and we came to the loose conclusion that there must exist a sort of temporal graft that occurs when objects - or people, in practice - move between time periods."

Sara, crouched beside the rat-eaten bearskin rug, shook her head at the three slackers and continued the search for the twenty-second century item. It wasn't under the rug. No, of course not, that'd be too easy.

"How do you mean, 'graft'?" Nate asked, stepping back to the end of the bar and crossing his arms.

Stein wet his lips in preparation of the symposium he was about to give. "Think of the timeline as a trunk, of a tree, with every infinite variation of the timeline as its branches. To keep it simple, let's look at a tree with only two such branches forking from the trunk. Imagine that a person - in this case Eobard Thawne - experiences time as movement along one of the branches. As a speedster, he then doubles back to a point along the trunk, makes his way to the fork and travels up the second branch, as we know, for fifteen years. Even though he originated in the first branch, he has now 'grafted' himself onto the second. Remove the second branch from the tree and you excise Eobard Thawne from that section of the timeline - but the removal of that section alone does not invalidate the path he traveled along the trunk, which is a constant and immutable past for both timelines."

Ray nodded as he followed along. "So it's like this point in 1903 is somewhere on the trunk, and the timeline we're protecting from aberrations is actually the one he created in the year 2000, which includes the trunk, and even though Eobard Thawne will never be born in the 22nd century in _this_ timeline, we can still find evidence of the one who _was_ born in _that_ timeline….right?"

"Something like that," Stein agreed.

Nate sucked on his lip, considering. "Sounds like one of the side effects of staying too long in an alternate or altered timeline is having time catch up to you. Like, the way we see changes in time start to set if an aberration hasn't been corrected quickly enough. Otherwise why would the death of Thawne's ancestor in this timeline have any effect on him if that other timeline still exists separately from ours?"

"Quite," Stein agreed, a touch more reluctantly. "As I said, this theory was the product of a brief discussion. A very brief discussion, really. More of a casual chat, now that I think of it."

Ray leaned his elbow on the countertop and the wood groaned a warning note. "Taking what Barry said about his months in the Flashpoint timeline into account, it makes sense. His memories from this timeline were being overwritten by the ones that belonged to the him that should have experienced natural time between 2000 and 2016. That does make sense, right?"

"Or how memories of having a daughter can oust memories of not having one, once the change has been made and time has set," Stein added quietly.

"Sure, sure," Nate said, drawing attention off that sore subject, "The era Thawne ended up grafting into, the early twenty-first century, he had no existing self to merge with. He must have fused into the timeline of his future self, while still retaining his individuality."

Ray tipped his head to the side, his brow knit in amicable consideration. "It's a working theory, at least."

"Hate to interrupt the egghead convention," Sara called, rising fluidly from her crouch. She stepped around the crumbling saloon furniture to Nate's side, clapping a thin rectangular object to his chest and her dusty ashy hand to his back. "Found this lodged behind the stove, something tells me it didn't belong there."

Nate briefly tried to eye over his shoulder at the cosmetic damage done to his shirt, but the pressing mystery of the object in his arms very quickly commandeered his attention. It was, the geek squad were surprised to see, the unassuming and familiar shape of a worn paperback book.

"They had books in 1903," Ray said, craning dangerously over the rickety countertop to get a better look at the thing. His statement sounded suspiciously like a question.

"While it's true that the paperback book dates back to the early 1800s," Nate said thoughtfully, "this one was published in 1994. Also, there's an inscription: 'Henry, you are the verse in my heart, happy anniversary - Nora.' Dated 2004."

He held up the book to show them the title page. A small white envelope slipped from between pages yellowed and warped with exposure to the elements, and fell to the floor with a small clatter.

Ray instantly reared back from his slouch, the foundations of the bar cracking under the force of his recoil. "Is that the trap?!"

"Could be," Sara replied, cavalier. She grinned up at Nate. "Why d'you think I palmed it off on the iron man?"

"I see how it is," Nate grumbled, steeling up his arm to the elbow and stooping to retrieve the fallen item. "I thought you brought me along for my wealth of experience as a time detective, but really I'm just here to do all your heavy lifting."

"Literally!" Ray chimed in, his self-appreciative chuckle a little on the nervous side as he warily ogled what was most certainly a trap.

Said trap, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a plain white envelope, the unsealed flap tucked in along one of the narrow ends. "That's weird," Nate mused, turning it over in his metallic hand, "It's addressed to Barry."

The crew exchanged concerned looks. "That would seem to weigh in on the side of trap, wouldn't you think?" Stein proposed. If he edged a little closer to the bright gap of the doorway, nobody blamed him.

"Wait a minute," Ray said, "Are we one hundred percent sure that Thawne left this? Wasn't Nora Barry's mom's name?"

"Nora and Henry Allen," Stein said thoughtfully, "Why yes, yes those were their names. May I see the book, Nathaniel?"

Nate passed the book over the counter to Ray, who leaned the remaining distance to pass the book obligingly to Stein. Then Nate thumbed open the envelope and dropped its contents into his palm. The futuristic round data chip plinked into his hand, metal on metal.

Sara passed the chronograph over the chip, and the device pinged a series of assertive tones. "Unless Mrs. Allen had a secret supplier of twenty-second century tech, my money's still on Thawne."

"So, what does this mean?" Ray asked the room. "Barry - Barry-Prime from the timeline where his mom lived - brings the book back in time to here, and Thawne-Prime brings this tech back in time and ... leaves it in the book for Barry to find?"

Sara narrowed her eyes, sweeping her considering gaze between Stein's book and Nate's chip. "Yeah, I'm not seeing the angle here, either."

"One man's aberration is another man's book of poems," Stein said absently, flicking through the pages.

Nate cleared his throat, an obvious attention-grabber. When he proceeded to say nothing at all, Sara humored him with a short, "Yes, Nate?"

"Well," he started, slowly, uncommonly shy or characteristically dramatic, "I have to admit I've seen this sort of thing before."

Ray and Sara exchanged a quick look. She crossed her arms, squaring her stance. "Out with it."

"You know the way I found you guys in 1942, right? I collected data on the past and noticed the inconsistencies - inconsistencies _exactly_ like finding a book out in the middle of nowhere, a hundred years before it's been published. Some of those inconsistencies led me to the Legends; but the rest of them, well, let's just say they painted a very specific picture of two time-travelers meeting up in various out of the way places. Places and times where they wouldn't draw attention to themselves."

"Two time-travelers, you mean two speedsters."

"Guess so."

"Barry- and Thawne-Prime."

"Looks like."

"And you didn't feel like sharing this information because…?" Sara flipped a hand outward in an irritated shrug.

Again Nate hemmed and hawed, stubbing the toe of his boot into a warped knot in one of the floor boards. "Ok, well I wasn't sure, until just now, that the evidence pointed to the Flash and the Reverse-Flash. And anyway, I always assumed these things were left by a man and a woman, on account of said evidence only ever showing up in these secret ... love nests."

Sara snorted. "Some love nest."

Nate waved her off. "Sure, it's nothing but a derelict ghost town now, but that book wasn't left here yesterday. Picture it, I don't know, six months ago, the dead of winter, a remote little hideaway where they won't be disturbed. There's a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, for crying out loud. It's not hard to imagine that a little poetry would go a _long_ way in that scenario."

"Are you saying that the Flash and the Reverse-Flash..." Ray trailed off, groping visibly for a phrase he was comfortable using in public, not finding it, and eventually settling on the all but unintelligible pantomime of tapping the tips of his two pointer fingers together.

Sara's eyes narrowed to a bright, considering gleam, her leer one of quiet astonishment as she beheld the miracle that was Dr. Raymond Palmer, actual adult.

"I'm not _saying_ anything, but it all makes sense now that I've met Thawne in person. You can't tell me you haven't seen those leather pants of his," Nate intoned, ducking his chin to look knowingly up at Ray. He swung this look around on Sara to get her confirmation. "Sara, back me up on this."

Sara's leer deepened, even as she wagged a finger at him. "Normally I wouldn't condone your use of stereotypes, but I feel you on this one. Our boy rocks his leather and doesn't care who knows it."

As this strand of conversation spun on, Stein looked more and more like he was going to be sick. Finally he snapped the book shut as if continued exposure to it might reveal something too risque for his sensibilities, and rounded on the other three with a stuffy flap of his handkerchief.

"Please let me remind you that this is Eobard Thawne we're talking about, none other than the Reverse-Flash and founder of the so-called Legion of Doom - a man who has ruined countless innocent lives and will continue to do so unless we stop him from getting the Spear of Destiny. Forgive me if I don't feel like gossiping about his romantic inclinations while reality itself hangs in the balance." He balled up his handkerchief and returned it roughly to his pocket as if to make a point.

The others cast sheepish looks at one another. Sara tucked the chronograph into a back pocket and held out a hand to take the envelope and chip back from Nate. He powered down and handed it over without a word.

"Martin's right," Sara said, securing the chip in a jacket pocket. "Whatever happened in the other timeline, all that's out of our hands. Let's get back to the Waverider so we can deliver this to Future-Cisco and then get back to stopping _our_ Thawne from messing up _our_ timestream." 

**IN MEDIA RES**

* * *

PART II.a

 **Central City, Missouri - 2024 - SPRING**

So this is what the collapse of reality itself looks like.

He can feel it in the periphery of his senses, this supernatural gravitational force that softly yet insistently tugs at his bones to join it in infinite oblivion. Running back towards it, back to 2024 at Barry's urgent summons, it had loomed ahead of him like a cold dark spot in the Speed Force, foreboding with all the the grim surety of a brick wall and cut brakes. He hasn't even seen it yet but he doesn't particularly feel the need to; he's well aware of the old adage about staring into the abyss. He's afraid he'll recognize himself in the void.

It hangs up there over his head like a guillotine blade, silent, impossible, unforgiving: Eobard Thawne's long overdue date with destiny.

The pinprick singularity, a rapidly unraveling rip in the fabric of space-time, is up there, too.

The midnight sky he can see as he dashes through ground zero, downtown Central City, is a vicious blood red. No stars, no moon, just the blood of a thousand trillion lifetimes being siphoned out of the past-present-future and funneling into the bottomless nothingness like so much dirty water circling the drain.

For some reason, Eobard can't stop _laughing_.

That is, until Barry banks up the side of a pedestrian overpass to circle back around and punch him in the face at mach speeds.

(In a dim, semi-rational corner of his brain, he realizes how this will look to the history books. The Reverse-Flash chasing the city's very own Scarlet Speedster until something gives and the two hated rivals come to blows. He can see the headline now - but maybe that's because it's a headline he's had seared into his memory for the last thirty-five years.)

"You do have quite the fondness for a dramatic gesture," he drawls through his bloodied smile once he's extracted himself from the overturned tanker truck which had so kindly broken his fall. "It's one of the things I've always loved about you."

Barry stalks forward and shoves a hand down to help him up. Eobard readily takes him up on the offer, clasping Barry's arm in his own and flowing to his feet to stand toe to toe and eye to eye with the Flash. He won't have many chances to get this close again. He's out of time. They're out of time.

"This is not a joke, Eobard," Barry growls. He tries to pull his arm away but Eobard just comes with it, silent, intent, smiling blood. Barry has to tear out of his grip, leaving them both reeling.

"What about this is funny to you?" Oh no, Barry's mad. He's got lightning in his eyes. Bits of the city are crumbling around them, distorted into nothingness as the periphery of the singularity's event horizon laps outwards in rolling waves. Like footprints washed away in the surf. Like they never even existed.

The humor drops off Eobard's face in a heartbeat. The blood is rushing in his ears and he _swears_ he can hear the nothing-nowhen drone of the void calling to him, a voice that wicks under his skin like oil, urging him up and up into the gentle cradling arms of perdition.

"Funny? I can't think of anything about this that's funny." He can't even hear himself. He doesn't know if he's whispering or if he's shouting. There's lightning in Barry's eyes and his world is falling down around him and there's a speck of pure non-existence growing in the sky that wants to invite him home. If he can't laugh about it, he's not sure what he could do to relieve the suffocating pressure of the situation.

Barry's lightning arcs from his eyes into the air around him as he flickers forward a step to grab a fistful of Eobard's suit front. He rocks him, attempting to shake Eobard out of his nihilistic trance. "I get it, you're angry. You think I'm not? I'm leaving everything behind - Iris, my family, the city, my entire life. Iris," he repeats, his head and shoulders drooping. The fist on Eobard's suit clenches tight. "I didn't say goodbye."

Eobard wraps a hand around Barry's wrist, clinging to this lifeline while it lasts. He should shove Barry off, should face fate with dignity and tell him that he's right, tell him that what the universe is asking of them is righteous. Noble, even. He should lie and tell Barry that whatever happens, they didn't have a choice. That their sacrifice will mean something - everything, even - to those left to carry on in their wake.

Righteous? Noble? No, he's Eobard Thawne. He's the Reverse-Flash. If this is actually the promised end to life as he knows it, then he's going to claw every last shred of Barry Allen out of this existence until all that remains is a hollowed-out husk - that's all a life without Barry Allen has ever been, or could ever hope to be.

The rumble of existential chaos spins down to a muted background whine as he holds on to Barry. This time, when he speaks, it feels as though his words travel through rarified air, crystal clear and sharp as daggers.

"We don't have to go through with it," he whispers. It's a useless, selfish plea. He can't imagine a world where the Flash forsakes his heroic duties, but Eobard's never held himself to such limitations. He can freely give voice to blasphemous thoughts. Still, he doesn't want to see Barry's inevitable look of betrayal, so he pulls the Flash close and breathes words of cosmic treason into his ear.

"There's nothing keeping us from staying right here," he's saying, and he suddenly feels a crazed conviction in the errant thought. A punch-drunk fervor to damn the world a million times over in exchange for a few more moments with Barry. "Just the two of us. Nobody will know once it's all over."

Crushed tight against him, Barry shudders. Eobard wonders - horrified - if Barry could possibly consider taking him up on the offer.

It takes an unnaturally long moment to realize that Barry's shaking his head against his shoulder. Then, before he can react, Barry's shoving violently out of the cage of Eobard's arms. Electricity still dances along the long lithe line of him, but his stormy eyes are dulled now by impotent remorse and fury. Eobard suspects he mirrors the emotion, dutifully playing his assigned role as Barry's foil until the very end.

The full weight of this unfolding moment lays squarely on Eobard's shoulders. He looks up, craning his head back slowly as though the action costs him more than he's willing to give. Finally, achingly, he acknowledges the infinite pitmark in the blood-red sky that winks down on him like a inverse star.

"I've been such a fool," Eobard admits to the End of All Things, "thinking I could make deals with destiny."

He tears his eyes away from the singularity and drops his gaze to Barry. His Barry. "I should have known I would never be able to pay this debt, when it came time to settle."

"Thawne," Barry warns, and it's exactly the right move in all the wrong ways. "Do what you have to do."

Eobard rolls his neck, almost a drunken, unhinged maneuver. In answer, whether he's aware of it or not, Barry starts shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Eobard thinks it's like being thrown into a long-forgotten dream. He knows, as he has always known, exactly how this ends.

"Maybe I will," Eobard tells him, his eyes sharp and his smile wicked. "Maybe I won't. Maybe thinking you could trust me all these years was your greatest mistake, Barry Allen."

Too quick for the average observer to catch, the Flash and the Reverse-Flash fly for each other's throats.

This is probably right, Eobard thinks. This is probably poetic. Ending this in violence, same as it began all those years from now. As it still must begin so many years ago.

This old dance is nostalgic, nothing like the show fights they'd endeavored to stage whenever Eobard came to town, a playful attempt to keep the wool over the eyes of history. The steps are familiar and bittersweet, each bloodthirsty blow a reminder to each of what it was like to live back-to-front with his rival, trembling in the other's shadow until the day the tables turned and their roles reversed. Only this time they're both meeting at the peak of their ability, with unfathomable reservoirs of skill and endurance, and both with everything left to lose.

Eobard feels each passing second slip away from him forever as he forces himself on the Flash in the only way he's ever felt entitled to, with fists and lightning and an unspoken understanding that he fills a niche in Barry's life that no one else in all of the multiverse ever could. His old tired anger at his scripted destiny flares up hotter and hotter as he confirms with a leaden certainty that the reverse has also always been true.

He'd always known this day would come. Only, he had naively envisioned his part in doomsday as limited to walking Barry to the door and waving him off with a tear in his eye. (And somehow this whole time he thought that scenario would be simple, easy? That he could just walk away from Barry Allen?) How hilariously mistaken he's been to think that fate would ever release him from its grand production. The role might have changed, but the script remains the same.

Be Barry Allen's undertaker, the multiverse keeps insisting, be the tool of the Flash's final and complete destruction.

A world without the Flash - unimaginable. Incomprehensible. He'd rather no world at all.

Hadn't he always wanted the choice? Wasn't his deepest desire to choose the course of his own destiny? To believe, even for a second, that Eobard Thawne lived for himself?

Silently, the singularity whispers the kind of sweet nothings that reverberate through the darkest chambers of his heart. It would be so easy to refuse his marching orders, to play the mutineer for the first and last time, and choose to let the eternal and infinite swallow him up. The alternative -

Eobard realizes he's stopped running. Under the all-seeing eye of absolute undoing, he's got the Flash hoisted by the throat against the plate glass window of an evacuated Jitters. The brick wall on either side, the lamp post on the corner, the boxed shrubberies in the corner of his vision are all wavering in and out of existence, tenuous as a candle about to burn itself out. It won't be long now.

Barry looks down on him with unreadable eyes. He reaches - not to pry Eobard off, not to claw for his release - a gloved hand coming to rest tenderly on the exposed skin of Eobard's cheek below the cowl.

"Please," Barry gasps, "Eobard, please."

Eobard curses everyone and everything he's ever known, but none more fiercely than Barry Allen. He sets Barry back on his feet, every fiber of him livid as he submits unwillingly to this angelic avatar of virtue. He never had a choice. Not with Barry Allen.

And now his time has run out.

"See if you can keep up, Flash," he sneers, wild and heartsick and furious beyond reason. He doesn't wait to see if Barry's fit to follow as he tears his own hole in space and time with the sole purpose of murdering the mother of the man he loves, the result of which will be his personally authoring an infinite number of destinies; excluding, of course, his own. 

PART II.b

 **Central City, Missouri - 2024 - SPRING**

"Hit it, H.R."

Cisco rolled his shoulders, shaking out his arms and legs, the segmented lenses of his shades lighting up in preparation of the temporal shift.

H.R., stationed at the back of the breach room at one of the consoles, winked at an un-cowled Barry, who stood observing with his arms crossed at the bottom of the steps. "I'm hitting it. _If_ you know what I mean."

Barry obliged him with a wan smile and a brief lift of his eyebrows. Cisco froze and then looked stiffly over shoulder, his eyes hidden from view but the line of his mouth more than adequately expressing his irritation. "H.R., _mi amado_ , I'm about to vibe across timelines in a way that's going to tear a hole in the multiverse - and that's only if we're lucky. A little focus, please?"

"Of course, of course," H.R. said, ducking his head apologetically. "I am also hitting the switch. I'm hitting the switch now." He waved his drumstick with a imperious flourish. "Once more, into the breach!"

"Thank y-ou," Cisco started to say. Before he could finish voicing the thought, reality warped itself around him and he scrabbled to wring the correct chronographic coordinates from the totem he held. He sank in a stomach-turning freefall of infinite potentiality until the psychic line he cast out into the cosmic roil caught something solid and pulled tight.

With an effect like an elastic band stretched to its limits and then being violently released, Cisco snapped out of the temporal corridor back into real fluid time. Back into S.T.A.R. Labs, too, the homey Cortex by the look of it, although the Team Flash he found there was the bizarro kind of familiar.

Dr. Wells threw a handful of papers over his head and swore fluently at Cisco's unannounced arrival. Barry took his appearing out of thin air with a modicum of grace, although he had his cowl back on in a flash. They stared at him from behind the Cortex's main computer bay.

"Thanks but no thanks, H.R.," Cisco grumbled to himself. He slid the shades off his face, trying to appear as non-threatening as possible off the tail end of that entrance.

"Mr. Ramon?" this Barry asked, recognizing the face at least, tentative relief coloring his surprise.

Dr. Wells had a hand to his forehead, sharp eyes behind his glasses darting all over Cisco's vibing gear, probing for answers without deigning to ask the questions. "My first guess would be that Ramon Industries is breaking new ground in teleportation technology."

Barry - or, more appropriately, the Flash - wheeled on Dr. Wells, "What, for real?"

Dr. Wells didn't hear the question. "But something tells me our visitor has nothing to do with Ramon Industries." His steely blue eyes hadn't flickered off Cisco for even a second.

Cisco smiled, a little tightly. "Sharp as ever, Dr. Wells. Let me get this out of the way because I have a lot of crazy stuff to explain and not a lot of time to do it - I know that you're Barry Allen, because in my timeline Barry Allen aka the Flash is my best friend. And also, yeah, I'm Cisco Ramon from another timeline. A divergent timeline that I need your help to create."

Upon hearing this last bit, Dr. Wells removed his studious gaze from Cisco and turned it on the Flash. Something unspoken passed between them, and Barry carefully pushed his cowl off his face.

"This is about the singularity, then," Barry guessed, visible tension gathering in his shoulders as he crossed his arms.

Cisco sighed in relief. "Okay, so you've been tracking the singularity. Great, but, you know, also not great. Just leaves me less to explain."

"You still have plenty to explain, Mr. Ramon," Dr. Wells said shortly. He sifted some of the disarrayed papers on the desk and waved a handful at Cisco with deliberate meaning. "By what means could you possibly have been able to detect a singularity from an alternate timeline, and why, for instance, does it fall to us to create said timeline?"

Raising his hands - one holding his shades and the other the totem he'd used to vibe this timeline - Cisco was about to answer to the best of his ability when Barry pointed and snapped, "That book, where did you get it?"

All eyes went to the unassuming and fairly decrepit paperback. Cisco's brow furrowed. "Is that the question you want me to answer first?"

Dr. Wells looked quietly over at Barry, as if waiting for his confirmation. After a moment Barry dropped his arm and shook his head once.

"Proceed as you wish, Mr. Ramon," Dr. Wells allowed. He kept his watchful eye on Barry for a heartbeat longer, only directing his attention back to Cisco when he began to speak.

"It's like this," Cisco started, tucking a stem of his shades behind his jacket collar, "in the year 2000, Eobard Thawne aka the Reverse-Flash, murdered Nora Allen."

Barry barked an overly loud scoff. "Never happened. Never gonna happen."

"I hear you on that, I really do, Barry, and I'm sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am to have to lay this on you." Cisco's tone rode a line between sympathetic and persuasive, moving increasingly towards the latter as he went on. "But for the sake of reality itself - both our realities - it has to happen. You and the Reverse-Flash have a huge street fight tonight. It ends with him going back in time to kill you, but you stop him, so he kills your mother instead. This is fact in the timeline I'm from."

"Eobard would never-" Barry cut himself off, biting back the rest of the thought. He looked to Dr. Wells for assistance. "That's crazy, right?"

Dr. Wells' voice was low, somber. "Hear the man out, Barry. We know the cause of the singularity is a temporal paradox; this Mr. Ramon may very well be presenting us with the resolution we have heretofore been unable to identify."

Cisco looked around the Cortex and spotted the glass diagram board. "Some things never change," he muttered. Addressing Dr. Wells, he pointed to it. "Do you mind if I…?"

Dr. Wells waved a hand. "Be my guest."

Barry had an agitated hand worrying his jaw, and Dr. Wells put a calming hand on his shoulder as they watched Cisco squeak a cap off one of the pens and sketched a horizontal line that stretched from one end of the board to the other.

"You know the theory of temporal grafting, right?" Cisco looked over his shoulder to see Dr. Wells' small nod. "Okay. So we know that if you travel in time and spend a significant duration in another era, then you eventually merge with the you that already existed in that timeline. If this graft doesn't take, then you experience the multiverse's immune system response, which manifests as time quakes and time wraiths and so on."

He exemplified the act of traveling back in time and altering it by drawing a loop that lifted off the right-hand side of the line, connecting it to a point at the far left and continuing through in a slant that forked down and away from the trunk line

"Antibodies that reject and attack the grafted individual," Dr. Wells agreed. "You've had some luck avoiding those, haven't you, Barry?"

Barry just ground his teeth and threw a hand angrily at Cisco. "So the singularity is the next level defense response from the multiverse. Now you're trying to tell me that screwing up the timeline - killing my mom - is going to make it go away?"

Cisco dipped his head placatingly, his hands held up to bid them to wait a moment longer. "That's where it gets tricky, I understand. But creating a timeline where your mom is killed when you're a little kid isn't screwing anything up. It has to happen. It _has_ happened. I couldn't be here if it didn't. But I'm here, aren't I?"

Barry balled his fists on his hips, shaking his head with a barely concealed sound of disdain. He half turned away, unready and unwilling to believe any of this.

"If you'll allow me to make a supposition," Dr. Wells said, letting Barry step out of the conversation for the time being, "if this singularity we've detected is the collapse of all realities due to a temporal paradox, then your belief is the murder of Nora Allen in 2000 by Eobard Thawne from this timeline's future will close the open loop, averting the paradox. Now, granting that, how did you conclude that the relevant parties originated in this particular timeline?"

"Ah, that," Cisco started, "It's all very timey-wimey, if I'm being honest."

Barry shot him a dirty look at his use of less than scientific language, but Cisco quickly continued. "It has to do with the flat timeline theory, which I was getting to," he explained.

Dr. Wells winced, a faint deepening of his crow's feet. "I'm afraid you'll have to enlighten me, Mr. Ramon."

"Okay, so if you think of each separate timeline as a strict linear progression of cause and effect," Cisco gestured with the pen along the length of the trunk and then again along the branching line, "then you run into some wild scenarios in the case that these discrete cause-effect strings start forming closed loops between timelines."

He pointed to the fork off the main line. "This is Eobard Thawne from your future traveling to both our pasts and directly creating this divergent timeline. Now this is today-" he drew a vertical line that cut down through both the trunk and the branch, "-April 24th, 2024."

On each of the points where the vertical line intersected the other two, he scribbled a messy dot.

"And this is the singularity. One in your timeline, one in mine."

"Very artistic, Mr. Ramon," Dr. Wells interjected, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Cisco took it in stride. "So now if we look at the cause-effect structure of the alpha timeline and the divergent beta timeline, we can say that this conversation we're having right now is Event A, Eobard Thawne in the year 2000 is Event B, and the singularity in my timeline is Event C." He wrote the letters in the appropriate places before capping the pen.

"To answer your question, getting from C to A involved a little time excavation to dig up this book, which had Thawne's temporal fingerprints all over it, and a little of my own personal mojo to trace its origin back to your timeline. But that's all academic. Now get ready for this."

Cisco held the pen against the board, along the vertical line between that ran between A and C, and carefully swung the bottom of the glass up so that the pen rested on the flat surface with only its bright red cap visible.

"In the flat timeline theory," he said, tracing the bottom frame of the board that faced the room, "this is your timeline. A view of time-space where the only thing that matters is the linear cause-effect structure; any self-contained loops are compressed into 1-D."

Cisco motioned to the pen's red cap. "And this is your singularity. Our singularity, I should say. Just one, located at the point where the consolidated timeline reaches lethal levels of quantum flux due to the unclosed loop."

"The result of the unstable paradox," Dr. Wells hummed appreciatively. "Each one of these events cause the next, A causing B, and B causing C, and C causing A. If any of these links break, the whole chain breaks."

"And you get a temporal paradox with a side of reality-dissolving singularity," Cisco finished with a shrug.

"And you brought the singularity from your timeline, didn't you?" Dr. Wells' eyes flashed with serene accusation behind his glasses, his hands folded carefully under his chin. "You ruptured time-space just by coming here."

"I had to," Cisco said simply. "The singularity in your timeline is a point of fact. They'll call it the Crisis. It _has_ happened, and it will _always_ happen and it's _happening_ right now."

Dr. Wells only nodded, crunching the numbers and finding them sound. "And the only way to keep both our realities from collapsing like a house of cards is for Eobard Thawne to run back to the year 2000 and murder Nora Allen. If he's not already on his way, you can bring him here, can't you, Barry?"

Barry dropped a startled look on Dr. Wells, who met it evenly. "Why are you talking about this like it's a done deal? Don't we need to, you know, verify this claim?"

Cisco stepped towards him, a hand outstretched to placate, to plead. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry that I dropped this on you out of the blue, but you don't have a lot of time. As we speak, both our timelines are in a state of elevated quantum flux that will continue to wreck space-time until the loop is closed. It's going to be bad. The city's going to take a hit. You're going to need to call for backup, because on top of evacuating the city, you're going to have your hands full with Thawne."

Dr. Wells arched one eyebrow. "You're right about that, Mr. Ramon. I'll send a blast out to the JLA to let them know what we're in for."

Barry's eyes went to the ceiling, and he chewed his lip while shaking his head in tiny motions as he remained unconvinced.

"I have a feeling the Green Arrow, Hawkgirl, and the Atom are free," Cisco suggested helpfully. "But again, I hate to sound like a broken record, you need to act fast. We all have until midnight tonight, then it's game over, man."

"I just - I need a second." Barry threw a dark look in Cisco's direction, not even seeing him, and stalked from the room.

Dr. Wells, already tapping away at the screens in front of him, glanced up at Cisco and then back down at his work. "Forgive him. He knows what he has to do, and he'll do it. You'll agree that this is an upsetting turn of events for him."

Cisco chewed the inside of his cheek, digging a flashdrive from his pocket. He wagged it in his fingertips for a second, then reached over the back of the console desk to drop it near Dr. Wells' keyboard.

"It gets worse," Cisco told him, his voice flat. "Barry - the Flash - doesn't come back from this. Not to your timeline, anyway."

Dr. Wells met his solemn gaze, slowly straightening up from the desk and crossing his arms over his chest. "I'm sure you're aware that you are asking a lot of us, Mr. Ramon."

Cisco broke the stare first, dropping his eyes, guilty. He motioned to the flashdrive. "There's more information on that. Everything about the Crisis we could transfer from Thawne's twenty-second century copy of Gideon."

"Evidence that the Thawne with whom we're familiar did indeed wind up in your timeline," Dr. Wells mused. He put a hand over the flashdrive, slipping it off the desk and into his pocket. "I'll make sure Barry sees it. It won't make it any easier for him, but it may speed things along."

"Thank you, Dr. Wells. This won't … mean anything to you, but I've always wanted to thank you in person." Cisco shrugged, self-conscious, and a crooked smile wound its way across his face. He lifted a hand over the back of the desk, offering it to Dr. Wells.

Dr. Wells' sharp blue eyes fixed on it for a long second. Then he raised his own hand and firmly accepted Cisco's handshake. "Goodbye, Mr. Ramon."

Cisco nodded, letting go of Dr. Wells' hand and the alpha timeline with the same motion. The bright lights of the Cortex swirled away into the chaotic always-everywhere of the time stream, and then Cisco was staggering back into the cavern of the breach room.

"Cisco, how was it, did you make it?" This was Barry, his best friend, reaching out with a steadying hand on his shoulder.

Blinking hard at the transition, Cisco allowed himself to be lead a few steps towards the console platform. His bearings returned after a handful of moments, and he very nearly leapt away from Barry and up the steps, careening around the railing to crash into the computers there.

"Alpha Barry wasn't too thrilled by the news," he said, glancing down at Barry with something like apology in his eyes, "But Dr. Wells was pretty certain that they'd be able to grab Thawne and prevent the singularity."

"That's great - Cisco, you did it," Barry clapped his hands to the back of his head, relieved and impressed.

Cisco kept working away at the computer, focus glued to the information scrolling down the screens. "Checking on the state of our singularity now. But yeah. I think we did it."

H.R., slouching over the other console, scratched his temple with the end of his drumstick. "You met Dr. Wells, then."

"Yep."

"The real Dr. Harrison Wells from this Earth."

"A version of Earth-1 Harrison Wells, yes."

"I bet he isn't as much as a silver fox as me," H.R. supposed, frowning.

Cisco's hands froze in midair over the keyboard, and he cocked his head, as if considering. "Don't be too sure of that, he had this kind of sweater-vest headmaster vibe that was working for him. You know, not too soft, not too stern."

H.R. stepped away from his console, squaring his shoulders like a man about to face a firing squad.

"I could - I could wear a sweater-vest."

Barry hid his grin behind his hand, and Cisco didn't even look up. "Uh-huh. You look like you stole your entire wardrobe from a hipster indie band roadie that's half your age. Yahtzee, baby, quantum flux has reached negligible levels; not getting any readings on the singularity. It's almost like it never happened, which, in a sense, it didn't."

Cisco dropped his head back with a wild shout that reverberated around the breach room. "I can't believe that actually worked. I need an aspirin and a handle of tequila."

"You did good, Cisco," Barry applauded. He started to come up the steps but he paused with his hand on the rail. A heartbeat, and then, behind him, the familiar blue whirlpool of causality swirled open over the breach pad.

"I had to go and jinx it, didn't I," Cisco groaned.

Barry turned back towards the breach, holding up a cautioning hand. "I think -" he said, haltingly, "I'm coming."

H.R.'s jaw dropped. He furiously stabbed his drumstick towards Barry and glared across at Cisco. "How come he gets to make rude jokes and I don't?"

His question was ignored. Out from the wormhole came the Flash, weary and worn. His suit was ripped and bloodied, smelling faintly of diesel and smoke. His feet hit the floor and he stumbled, nearly going over if it weren't for Barry's quick blink forward to catch him.

"Hey, easy," Barry said, helping the Flash right himself. "You did it, we got you."

The Flash looked at Barry, staring through him. Then recognition visibly set in, and he pushed Barry off roughly. "I didn't do anything," he spat. " _He_ did. He really killed her."

"Yeah, yeah he did," Barry said, glancing back to Cisco and H.R. for backup. They stared down at the two Barrys from the platform, stock still, utterly out of their depth. Barry turned back to the Flash, his hands up to settle, to soothe. "And I've had to live with that every day for the last twenty-four years. But it's okay. Really, it's okay. He only did what he had to do."

The Flash waved off Barry's consoling reach, turning to pace around the empty space in front of the breach pad. His hands went to his face, and the other three pretended not to see him wipe away his tears. After a minute of this, the Flash turned searching eyes on the room, stopping at last on Cisco.

"Mr. Ramon-"

Two voices answered him: "Yes?" Cisco shot H.R. a dirty look.

"Please, call me Cisco. Mr. Ramon is my husband." He made a dismissive gesture towards the man in question.

"We don't hyphenate on my Earth," H.R. told the Flash, as if any explanation had been asked for or needed.

Cisco snapped his fingers several times to get H.R.'s attention. "Sweetheart, how about you let the grown-ups talk now, alright?"

This trivial exchange washed on over the Flash, completely unheeded. "Cisco," he said earnestly, stalking past Barry and up to the console platform, "The Reverse-Flash - Eobard Thawne - what happened to him, is he here?"

It was Cisco's turn to look to Barry for guidance. At Barry's small helpless shrug, Cisco spread his hands and offered the Flash a reassuring smile. "No worries there, my friend. We took care of him ages ago."

A thunderstorm of emotion passed over the Flash's face. "What do you mean?" he asked, his voice low and cold.

Again Cisco looked to Barry, a trifle started this time around. "We … it's complicated because we didn't know who we were dealing with until it was too late. But to make a long story short, we fought him, and we won."

Barry shuffled forward and put a foot on the bottom step, looking up at his alternate timeline doppelganger. "He lost his speed in the Crisis so he built the particle accelerator and created me, the Flash, just so I could open a wormhole and send him back to the future."

The Flash ducked his head down and to the side, putting Barry in his peripheral vision without really looking at him. "And you stopped him from going back?"

Barry rolled his shoulders, defensive and a little proud. "He gave me a choice, he wanted me to choose between saving my mother or stopping him. Obviously I had to stop him."

A heavy silence filled the breach room as the Flash processed this information. "He's dead?" A flat monotone question.

Cisco sucked both his lips in and let them go with a pop. "Functionally, yes. If you want to get specific, due to temporal grafting we were able to erase Eobard Thawne from this timeline entirely."

The Flash startled everyone present by attempting to put his fist through the console's steel desktop. The force of it knocked the book, Cisco's alpha timeline totem, to the floor. In the shocked silence that followed, the Flash calmly bent and retrieved it, thumbing the yellowed pages with infinite tenderness.

"I took his speed," the Flash said after a moment. He didn't look up from the book he held. "Most of it. The second she died, the exact instant the divergent timeline was created, I felt myself start to merge with that version of me. I didn't know if I would stay connected to the Speed Force long enough to make it out. I took his speed, thinking he'd find another way back."

While Cisco and Barry exchanged another volley of nonverbal communicaes, H.R. raised his hand. "Forgive me for interrupting, but I think I must be missing something. I never met the guy, but I always understood that the Reverse-Flash was nasty business. I'm H.R., by the way. Originally Earth-19 Harrison Wells, although don't be alarmed if you don't see the resemblance. Facial transmogrification' and all that."

H.R. extended his hand to the Flash, who just looked at it dully without moving.

"You were wrong about him." The Flash slowly lifted his eyes to look at H.R., Cisco, and finally Barry in turn. "He played his part in the Crisis because I asked him to, and in return for saving the multiverse, he gets erased from it?"

In the uneasy silence that followed, only one man was brave enough to speak.

"I lobbied hard to call it the 'Alpha-Beta-Crisis' because then it spells A-B-C," H.R. said brightly. "Nifty, right? Like that alphabet soup you have here, gosh I love that soup; on my Earth all we had was Roman numeral soup - can you say _boooo_ ring."

Cisco shook his head, eyes locked on the floor. "H.R., love of my life, shut your mouth before I divorce you again," he warned quietly.

H.R. just chuckled nervously. "You're joking - he's just joking. What a jokester, my Francesco. Really keen on his jokes, this one. Always with the jokes!"

"Keep flappin' that trap and we'll see if I'm joking, won't we?" When Cisco looked up at him, there was fire in his eyes.

H.R. paled. He twiddled his drumstick and edged towards the exit. "Why don't I just go grab us a couple of coffees? You still a decaf man, A.B.A? The first A stands for-"

"H.R.!"

In the wake of the echoes of Cisco's outburst dying down around them in the cavernous stillness of the breach room, H.R. effected his escape. "Right, I'll let you unpack that one on your own time. H.R. out."

Barry stirred, making to follow him. "Nate was right," he said, bitterly, enigmatically, to Cisco as he passed the Flash on the way to the door. "Nate was right all along."

Cisco was left alone with the grieving Flash, who stood there holding that book like a ghost of a man. He cleared his throat. "Look. I don't know who Eobard Thawne was before he got here, other than what he told us about his rivalry with you. But while he was here, lying to us every day, he did a lot of terrible things. Hurt a lot of people. I'm sorry if we got it wrong, but he didn't leave us a choice."

Very, very slowly, Barry lifted his head.

"Didn't he?" 

* * *

A Last love,

proper in conclusion,

should snip the wings

forbidding further flight.

But I, now,

reft of that confusion,

am lifted up

and speeding toward the light.

 **Recovery - Maya Angelou**

* * *

 **MAN OUT OF TIME**

* * *

PART III.b

 **Central City, Missouri - 2015 - SPRING**

Harrison Wells leaned back in his chair, slid his glasses back off his face, and became Eobard Thawne.

"While we're on the subject of confessions," he told the blank glassy lens of the holo-recorder, "I'll admit that sometimes I've wondered if you were ever real."

Eobard chewed over the admission, irritable, shifting in his chair like he might stand up and turn the recorder off. He looked down at the glasses in his hands, and when he looked up, there was something rueful twisting in his lips, some dark humor glinting in his borrowed eyes. He leaned forward, towards the lens.

"There was one-" here he stopped for a barking laugh, little more than a scoff, one elbow on the table and Wells' glasses dangling from his fingers, "-one truly chilling moment I remember, just a few years back, just after construction of the pipeline had broken ground. The days - and most, if not all, of the nights - were bleeding together with the crush of meetings and inspections and deadlines and what have you; in the thick of it one would think that the place was operating on snap decisions and caffeine alone. It wasn't, obviously. A decade of carefully laid plans were being executed by the most proficient workforce money could buy, but I remember it felt like the whole thing could come spinning off the axle at any moment."

Eobard's grin threatened to bend towards nostalgic. Catching it in time, he narrowed his eyes and tipped the scales of his expression in favor of bitter and away from sweet.

"Well. One of these endlessly late nights I'm walking through the corridors, alone, and because there's a brief turnover of the crews working below, for a moment everything's silent. A real, haunting silence. Now me, I hardly notice. I've got a hundred and one issues rumbling in my head, you know, the sort of overwhelming minutia that keeps the average industrialist up at night. Nothing new there, to be honest," he shrugs, "But here I am, Dr. Harrison Wells, completely lost in the business of setting up S.T.A.R Labs, and that's when it hits me."

Eobard settled evenly on his elbows, shoulders hunched, staring down at the plastic frames he held. Positioning these in view of the lens, he shook his head. His voice, when he continued, held an anger that ran quiet and deep like the ocean.

"In that moment, I _am_ Dr. Harrison Wells. _I_ am the inspired mind responsible for all this - for everything S.T.A.R Labs could and will be, I, _Dr. Harrison Wells_ , will be recognized and held responsible. I hadn't noticed when it had become such a natural and effortless feeling to be wearing this man's name and to be standing in his place, forging his legacy. So natural, in fact, that I had to stop and seriously consider the possibility that Eobard Thawne didn't exist."

He set the glasses on the table with infinite care, looking as though all he wanted in the world was to smash them into splinters with his fists.

Eobard looked back up, staring dead at the lens, and tersely wet his lips. "And if _he_ didn't exist, what guarantee did I have of your being real?"

He exhaled, another scornful almost-laugh, devoid of anything approaching humor. He stared into the lens for a long stretch, unblinking. Then he clicked his tongue and sat back in his chair again.

"Having come to the conclusion that none of this would mean a damn thing if you weren't out there, I soldiered on. Every day since our last … meeting, I have done, as you so rightly insisted, what I had to do. Every day spent working towards …." Here Eobard shook his head with his fingers pressed to his lips, musing for a thought that either wouldn't come or he couldn't voice.

He left that sentence unfinished, moving his hand up to scrub his forehead and eyes. Resetting his train of thought.

"I am a man out of time, Barry," he told the middle distance to the left of the recorder, somewhere off to his right. "In every delicate and calculated nuance of the phrase. I am out of time."

Eobard swung his head back around to fix the lens with a half-manic grin, his shoulders twitching with jumpy shrug that was echoed in the lift of his brows.

"'So what?' I suppose. I was never deluded enough to believe this story had a happy ending. Not any story that involves you and me. Not ours."

He shook his head, the mania hardening into a grim sobriety. "Our narrative is built on spite and is written in blood and there can be no plausible ending where both you and I find the salvation promised to all good and faithful servants. There is no clockwork _deus ex machina_ waiting to swoop down from the wings and deliver us from our tragedy. That's not the kind of story we are, and I've accepted that. I've known from the start that there was no looking you in the eye when all was said and done. I wouldn't be recording this if I didn't know, for a fact, that this is the only chance I have to…."

Eobard grimaced, a thinning of the lips and a deepening of the crow's feet at the sides of his eyes. Maybe Harrison Wells was a man who could apologize. This man was not Harrison Wells.

"Maybe I got ahead of myself. Clearly, if you're watching this, then I managed to get myself killed." He paused to let this sink in, an ironic smile directed at the lens. "I can't be too upset about it, because if you're watching this, then I also managed to close the last loop in making this message available to you. Playing Russian Roulette against the multiverse is a thrilling prospect, I assure you." He winked while saying this.

"In any case, since this is a message from a dead man, I want to ask you not to blame these people for what they've done. In this reality it's not too egotistical to say that each one of them is a masterpiece sculpted by yours truly, so in the end, if they were able to outwit me and orchestrate my death, then the appropriate response should be pride. Forgive them, if you can. And as for this timeline's Barry Allen, I wonder if you can forgive me."

Eobard spoke these last words directly to the lens, and as they faded from his lips he dropped his gaze as if to study the lab table a while. At last he sighed and lifted his head to address the the invisible future recipient of the message.

"Barry Allen." He said the name like a prayer, resonant with awe and holy fervor. "Words alone cannot express the width and depth of the many varied sentiments I carry for you. I face my destiny with the assumption that my actions have been eloquent enough."

His gaze went soft, turned inward, focused on something he couldn't share with the lens. The flicker of a real smile danced across his face, there and gone in a heartbeat, easy to miss. "See you around, Flash. When the time is right, I'll be there."

Eobard Thawne leaned forward and switched the recording off.

The events that unfolded before the end went more or less according to plan.

First, the truth about Harrison Wells was uncovered ( _exhumed_ might be a better word, given the circumstances), exposing Eobard as the charlatan he had been since the inception of this timeline. He was ready for this. He had more than a few trump cards hidden up his sleeve. Fifteen years of preparation and a genius intellect weren't so easily bested.

 _"Then face me now!" an impotent Barry shouted, just a voice in his ear, all bark and no bite._

 _"Oh," Eobard breathed, "We will face each other again, I promise you. Soon. Very, very soon." Whether he addressed a ghost or a what-if or a never-was, or even the wounded Barry Allen to whom he currently spoke, he couldn't be certain._

Second, Eobard collected his insurance, stealing Eddie Thawne away until the final key to restoring the particle accelerator could be completed. It didn't surprise him that Team Flash took their sweet time mounting a rescue for this relative (that's a pun) waste of space, but then again they were preoccupied with monkeying around and booking rogue international flights.

 _"I'm impressed you went to such great lengths to keep those people from harm. Ever the hero, huh, Barry?" The sentiment came out far less sarcastic than the situation required._

 _Barry didn't notice. He stood there with his shoulders squared and his brow set, full indignant tantrum mode. "You've hurt enough people."_

 _"I know, you see me as the villain. But Barry, if you were to look back - look back carefully - at everything I've done, every wheel I have set in motion, you would realize I have only done what I had to do. Nothing more. Nothing less." Only what another Barry Allen, from another time and place, had asked him to do. Not that he expected this Barry Allen to ever understand._

Then he was outgunned by a trio of kids who looked like they'd be more comfortable at a Halloween party than on a battlefield, and thrown into a dungeon of his own creation. The proverbial key, he presumed, was thrown away. It stung, the indignity of his capture, but imprisonment wasn't all bad; his request for Big Belly Burgers was respected for some reason, and even if he didn't have much room to stretch his legs, he'd had plenty of time as Harrison Wells to get used to that restless tingle.

Furthermore, Eobard had resumed his position of power, effortlessly continuing the manipulation of his team from the safety of his cell. Caitlin Snow, Cisco Ramon. Joe West. Barry Allen. Children unable to take care of themselves, craving his direction, his attention, even as they despised and distrusted him. He was more than willing to cater to their bad habits.

Barry, of course, came to him armed with a lifetime of thorny questions, the answers to which would only drive the barbs deeper. Eobard didn't mind watching his would-be-once-was rival buckle under the words Eobard had ready for him. This, too, was all part of the plan.

 _"Why were we enemies?"_

 _"It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter - anymore." Eobard spun some villainous lies, suited to the part. The myth of the Flash-Reverse-Flash feud, as dictated by fate, had always been destined to outlive them both. "I'm giving you a chance to undo all the evil I've done."_

Then there was Joe, coming to reprise his performance of Bad Cop slash Overly Protective Father, having no idea that Eobard had already been subjected to a very similar lecture in another lifetime, albeit under a wholly different context.

 _"There are people you care about. Isn't there." The phrasing of the question was a formality, rhetorical almost, an answer unnecessary to confirm what Joe already knew. Eobard wouldn't lie to him at this juncture anyway. "In the future I mean. I don't think you'd be this eager, go as far as you have, to get back to your time unless there were people there that you held dear. As dear as I hold Barry, and Iris."_

 _"I do." Eobard wouldn't lie, but he felt free to omit. This Joe, with his finely honed detective instincts, had hit the nail square on the head, although he could never have guessed the exact nature of Eobard's relationship with his daughter and son-in-law in that other life. Probably for the best not to mention it now._

And Cisco. Oh, Cisco, Cisco, Cisco.

Cisco came, with anger and betrayal eating gaping holes in his own defenses, walls built against the boogeyman too cheaply and too late, just to confirm for Eobard that the future was as yet on the right track. A to B to C to A, blood begetting blood and violence begetting violence, the Vicious Cycle in its purest form.

 _"Don't be afraid, Cisco. A great and …. honorable… destiny awaits you now. I only hope that as you're living your great adventure, that you remember who gave you that life, and that it was given out of love."_

Soon he had them wrapped around his finger, working like the well oiled machine he had built them to be, propelling his plans headlong into their final stages. There was a wormhole to create and a time sphere to construct. There were choices to make, and Barry made them, as only Barry knew how - with blistering spontaneity and a staggering minimum of forethought that made Eobard want to scream.

And that was as far as Eobard's plans took him, in this series of events. A lifetime of work, fifteen years in the making, crumbled into dust because favorite son Barry Allen willed it to be so. It was like Eobard had bet his entire fortune on black, and the House - that two-faced siren called Destiny - had spun the wheel and laughed when it landed on red.

In the end, there would be no grand homecoming for Eobard Thawne. (Bummer.)

Finally, a stray coincidence beyond all reckoning, like the trivial and all-important flap of a butterfly's wing, and, incidentally, part of no one's plan whatsoever: a choice made, unasked, by a nobody named Eddie Thawne.

Well. That's how this iteration of cause-and-effect played out, anyway. But you'd embarrass yourself in underestimating Eobard Thawne if you believed for a second that his plan ended along with him. 

* * *

Beloved,

In what other lives or lands

Have I known your lips

Your Hands

Your Laughter brave

Irreverent.

Those sweet excesses that

I do adore.

What surety is there

That we will meet again,

On other worlds some

Future time undated.

I defy my body's haste.

Without the promise

Of one more sweet encounter

I will not deign to die.

 **Refusal - Maya Angelou**

* * *

PART III.a

 **Central City, Missouri - 2025 - Winter**

It's cold.

Cold enough to stop a speedster in his tracks? The man jingling keys out of the pocket of his genuine leather overcoat wouldn't know. He's not the right guy to ask. Not anymore.

It's cold enough to make him impatient, at the very least. He fumbles the key into the padlock on the second try, the frozen metal sticking, and the padlock arm springs open with a click. He reclaims the key and hooks the open arm of the padlock on one of the links of the security gate that keeps the hoodlums from smashing the plate glass windows. Pulling the loose end of the chain from the frame set into the wall, he checks his footing for ice before heaving the gate to one side with the shredding screech of metal on concrete.

Keys in hand again, he unlocks the door handle and the deadbolt above it. He looks over his shoulder before depressing the latch and letting himself in - the twilit street is grayscale with muddy asphalt and smog-stained piles of snow lumped up around the streetlights. The frost-crusted sidewalks are empty and the motor traffic rumbles down roads more attractive than this one.

Maybe he suffers from a touch of paranoia, always watching his back for unseen agents spying from the shadows. Then again, maybe he wants to be followed; maybe he's waiting for someone to catch up.

You could ask him which one it is, but he won't answer. Nobody appears out of the evening gloom, anyhow, and he pushes his way on inside. The door closes. The neon signs in the windows sputter to life. They depict the colorful logos of major beer brands, mostly. Front and center, though, in a curving script that glows a vivid red, is the word "Joe's."

Inside the bar, the man occupies himself with the minutiae that comes with opening up shop. He may not be the fastest man alive, but he gets through all this in time. He is methodical and diligent, and a place like this affords him precious few distractions.

Whether it should be considered lucky or not, he isn't bothered by a single customer for most of the night.

He's finished organizing the display bottles behind the bar by relative opaqueness and is about to re-order them by label size when the annoying little bell over the door jingles brightly. It's probably one of his greatest regrets, sticking with the period ( _contemporary_ , he reminds himself) theme for the bar. But something had warned him that it wouldn't do any good to negotiate with fate; it certainly hadn't gone his way last time he had tried.

He turns towards the counter with a bottle of what happens to be a single malt whiskey in his hand, and his heart clambers up into his throat to see a blood-red windbreaker thrown carelessly over the bar.

The face it belongs to, though, leaves much to be desired. Sandy-haired, round in the cheeks, a little soft when it comes to the chin. Just some guy. Just some guy with eyes that glow with a secret he obviously wants to share.

The cost of owning a bar would be the drunks, wouldn't it, he reminds himself.

The guy's voice matches the face, plain, unexciting, nothing to write home about. "Been out of town a while," he says, like it's the funniest joke in the world. "Last time I was here this was a coffee shop or something."

"Jitters, sure," he nods, setting the whiskey down on the lower counter on his side of the bar, "Place closed up after the Crisis, been empty ever since. Landlady says she doesn't know whatever happened to the previous owners. Leased it for a song."

"Lotta people went missing after the Crisis." Red-windbreaker guy says. His mouth does this half-hearted shrug which manages to be both infuriating and charming. He gives the empty interior of the bar a lazy once-over. "Business hasn't picked up, yet, huh? How long you been open?"

The answer is a laugh, a single "Ha." To better explain this answer, he adds, "All told, about three hours. You're my first customer, in fact."

The guy's eyebrows raise slowly, an out of place look of disappointment glancing from his wide eyes. "For real? This is your grand opening? It's supposed to be a party."

"The last time I arranged for a grand unveiling, the whole thing blew up in my face." He wonders how long it'll take him to shake this incessant need to couch trivial statements in private riddles. Maybe it's just a part of him now, like so many things from that other lifetime are. "Tell you what. How about my first customer's first round is half off, is that more in the spirit of things?"

"I'll drink to that," the guy smiles. He's got a sunburst smile that looks like it comes easy. "To Joe's."

"To Joe's. What are you having?" He inclines his head slightly. "I'll beg your pardon for not asking sooner - it's my first day on the job, you see."

The guy magnanimously shrugs it off, and then, in a move that's flat-out audacious, winks. "I'll take a shot of that whiskey you were fondling when I came in."

A shot glass is procured and the whiskey is uncapped without a word. His hand steady, he pours the guy his discounted drink. He sets it in front of his customer, but the guy just grins that foolhardy grin at him and ups the ante.

"Now I'm going to be all self-conscious, sitting at the bar by myself. Bad form to drink alone, after all. Let me buy you a drink," the guy says, cheerful, "You know, since we're catering to the spirit of things? To celebrate your un-grand opening and all."

"I think you had one too many sales pitches in there," he says in response, dry as ice. Still, it isn't like he can get drunk on the job. "But a sale's a sale."

A second shot glass procured and filled, he raises his glass towards his customer, who mirrors the gesture. "To Joe's," they say, one as bright as the other is dark, and then together they drink.

"Don't take this the wrong way," the guy says, slamming his glass back onto the counter and wincing around the burn in his throat, "but you don't exactly look like a Joe." He leans a round cheek against his fist, his eyes watery from the sting of the alcohol. Not a man well-versed in his liquor, this one.

In the other corner, fifteen years of business lunches and industry meet-and-greets and charitable cocktail galas have forged him into a veritable master in the art of drinking. His shot glass meets the counter with a demure click of glass on wood. "That would probably be because I'm not a Joe. Though some people have told me I bear a passing resemblance to one Harrison Wells."

The guy squints, coy. "I don't see it."

"It's something about the eyes," he offers, deadpan. "The other guy wears glasses. The smug old bastard thinks they make him look smarter than he is."

The other guy snorts and says under his breath, "I'm going to tell him you said that." Raising his voice to directly address his not-Joe bartender, he asks, "If not Joe, then…?"

He crosses his arms, chewing on the question briefly. "Haven't decided yet," he replies, just as brief, still deadpan. There's a hard line burrowed in his brow.

"Ok, well," the guy laughs, flopping his hand to the countertop and leaning forward curiously, "Why call it Joe's, then?"

His eyes narrow a fraction, surveying this nosy Chatty Kathy with a hint of something that might soon become annoyance. "I thought it was the bartender who was supposed to listen to boring life stories," he drawls, his voice gravel. The other guy just waves a hand flippantly to indicate that he's not bothered by this role reversal, so he grabs the shot glasses and turns towards the small sink basin set under the far end of the counter.

"I knew a Joe once," he explains, running the glasses under the tap. "Long time ago. Owed the guy a drink and unfortunately had trouble getting around to delivering on that promise."

From the other end of the bar comes a set of words that hit him the wrong way. "That's a recurring problem for you."

"What-" he turns, slowly. He slides the green-checked dish towel from his shoulder automatically, drying his hands by rote. His mind is elsewhere, churning, "-would you know about that?"

He walks mechanically back to stand across the counter from his one and only customer, glaring into this sunny round face and not seeing it at all. "Who are you?"

The guy obligingly proffers his hand over the bar. "Call me Bart."

He reaches forward to accept the handshake against his better judgement. It's like he's suddenly been knocked underwater and he's not certain which way it is to the surface, the light wavy and the sound distorted and the unyielding pressure squeezing in on all sides.

The second their hands meet, Eobard feels like a drowned man who has had his life breathed back into his lungs. Like a man on his deathbed who has been told it's all been a mistake and he's fine, he can go home now. Hell, he feels like goddamn Sleeping Beauty herself, roused from her eternal sleep by true love's kiss.

The Speed Force arcs into him - floods into him - sparking along his dusty nerve endings and eddying into long-dry reservoirs. The heat of it is astounding, raw electricity charging through this human conduit at an impossible amperage, and the experience of taking it in all at once is almost as terrifying as that first lightning strike had been all those years from now.

It probably only takes a few scant seconds, jumping his dead battery like this, but when Eobard snaps back into his surroundings with a gasp, it feels like he's been gone a lifetime. (In the grand scheme of things, he's not wrong.)

"I'm sorry," he says, light-headed, shaking, holding onto this familiar-unfamiliar hand for dear life, "What did you say your name was."

"Bart," Barry says, that stupid beautiful grin plastered ear to ear on his stupid fake face, "Bart Allen. I've got family in town, you may know them."

"I may - ha, your family," Eobard mutters incoherently. He's still holding Barry's hand and when he notices this he very nearly throws it out of his grasp. He can feel the lightning in his eyes and he's afraid what he might do with all this newfound power.

"Barry Allen," he growls, planting both hands firmly on the counter top. "You're late."

Barry puts his head back and _laughs_.

"And where on earth did you acquire that face?" Eobard roars over the laughter, "I thought being stuck with this pruney mug until the end of time was as bad as it gets, but then you come waltzing in here looking like that. You're never happy unless you're proving me wrong, aren't you?"

"Oh that, I've got a - hold on a second," Barry says, flicking a mirthful tear from the corner of his eye. He rummages through the pockets of his windbreaker for a moment, ultimately retrieving a brass stylus of some sort. "A gift from a little place called Earth-19, to answer your question."

Barry activates the stylus, casting a flash of blue light onto his round face. There's a flicker of visual tearing, which, in three dimensions, is hard on the eyes - but then there he is, the one and only Barry Allen. He looks about ten years older than he should be, but that would be due to Eobard's memory being topped off with fresh memories of the wrong Barry Allen.

"Smoke and mirrors, then," Eobard nods. "Lucky you've got options."

Barry shrugs. "Light refraction technology, actually. I know the face will take some getting used to, but the newspaper says the CCPD's CSI director's been missing since the crisis, and, as far as anybody knows, the Flash has vanished for good. Bart Allen won't raise too many questions if he's moved back to town to be closer to his bereaved family in these troubled times."

"I knew a guy who believed everything he read in the newspaper," Eobard says, tossing Barry his top-shelf side-eye.

"It's a bias, I'll admit to that," Barry grins.

Eobard drops his attention to the spotless counter top below the bar, running the dishrag over it in a ploy to appear unconcerned. "And how is Iris? I shudder to think you came straight here without stopping home first."

Barry shifts and rustles with his jacket again, and Eobard glances up to see him tugging a thin rectangular object from another of his pockets. The weather-stained book goes onto the bar top between them, and they both ignore it after that.

"She's good, Iris is fine," Barry tells him, a series of bobbing nods accenting his words. "Happy I'm not dead, or not trapped in an alternate timeline, at least."

Barry stops himself, ducking his head with an embarrassed huff. He squints back up at Eobard, a hand anxiously smoothing down the already-smooth hair on the back of his head. "Which reminds me I owe you an apology for both of those things happening to you."

Eobard laughs, a single silent exhale that rocks his upper body with its force. His eyelids flutter closed for a heartbeat and he's shaking his head without intending to move at all. "You don't owe me a goddamn thing, Barry Allen. You saw him there, didn't you? I told him he could save her, even knowing the multiverse wouldn't allow him to. He ran all the way back there just to listen to her die."

That narrow chin wobbles while Barry's jaw works, and Eobard knows the effect won't be at all the same on the droll soft face he's chosen to wear for the rest of his life. "You only did what you had to do. I won't be your judge. You know I can't."

Eyes narrowed still, Eobard tosses his head to indicate the battered relic on the bar. "You watched it, then?"

"Nah," Barry says.

It's not at all the answer Eobard was expecting, so it doesn't quite take the first time. "No?"

Barry spreads his hands. "I have a good enough guess what it says. But as far as I'm concerned, whatever's on that disc is the last message of a dead man. Wouldn't be right to watch it while the man's still alive."

"You're too smart for your own good, you know that." It's not even a question. A hesitant smile is threatening to break out over Eobard's face and he wonders if, in fighting it, he doesn't just end up looking twice as undignified. "Here I thought I'd leave you a trail of breadcrumbs to follow - that is, if you so chose. Looks like I couldn't stop you from showing up on my doorstep even if I tried."

Barry leans his angular cheek against his fist again, looking up at Eobard with a hint of dreaminess in his partially lidded eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about breadcrumbs for. You left the hugest 'this way to Eobard' sign possible. When I saw Cisco had this book, and when he'd gotten it from, I knew instantly you'd found a way back here."

Eobard rolls one shoulder. "Like I said, I told him he could save her. I gave him that choice."

"Counting on that one-in-infinity chance that the timeline created as a result of his choice would be the one to take you home." Barry shakes his head. "Those are some odds to play against. If it were me, I wouldn't take 'em."

Eobard leans forward onto the bar. "An infinite number of Eobards were destined not to make it out of there," he says, the familiar existential ache settling over him, "The only risk was in being one of _them_."

"But you're you," Barry says, voice low, eyes bright. "Behind that face - which I don't mind at all, I have to say - you're still you. And here you are."

"Here we are," Eobard agrees. He's not sure what there is left to say.

Barry taps the warped cover of his mother's book with a thoughtful fingertip. "All that stuff they found that we have to leave behind - we've got our work cut out for us, don't we? If you've got the holo-recording on you, we can run back home and get my copy of this," he drums his fingers on the book, "out of the den. I know Iris would be thrilled to see you."

He's suddenly bashful, unable to lift his eyes from where they rest on the book cover. Their work's cut out for them indeed. They both have some battle scars that will need to mend before everything's back to the way it was before fate took them down two very different paths.

Eobard licks his lips. He reaches out and puts his hand on Barry's, on top of the book. He waits until Barry looks up.

"I intend to take you up on your offer at some point, so don't take this the wrong way: there's no rush. Now that I've got my speed back - by the way I'm not angry with you for taking it and I'll have to find some really creative and probably filthy way of thanking you properly for returning it - I'll close these last loops when I get to them. If I've learned anything from this life of mine, it's that everything happens in its own time. Whether you want it to or not."

Barry just nods, silent. Eobard slips his hand off and bends to pull two more shot glasses from the shelf below the counter. Barry watches him pour the whiskey, and flicks his eyes up to Eobard when one of the full glasses is placed in front of him.

"Besides," Eobard says, lifting his glass. "You can't just casually mention an 'Earth-19' and leave it at that. I've been away for fifteen years, remember, I believe we have some catching up to do."

The corner of Barry's mouth screws up into a chewed-on smile. He takes his glass in his thin fingers and lifts it in kind. "It's a long story, you sure you've got the time?"

Eobard's smile flashes brighter than lightning. "Barry Allen, who do you think I am? I've got all the time in the world." 

* * *

**Omake**

Checking the corridor was clear before he entered, Nate slipped into the study, loot in hand.

"Gideon, open a log for me, will ya? I've got to record the details of this alpha timeline artifact before we ship it off to Cisco." He squeezed himself behind the curved desk in the center of the room, setting the small worn paperback reverently on the table top between a carved stone bowl and the little magnetic globe.

"Certainly, Dr. Heywood," Gideon's ephemeral voice replied. "Will this be an addition to your series of speculations on the possible events that lead these artifacts to be strewn about the timeline?"

"You got it, Gideon," Nate told the room, his focus already scoping in towards the book and the mystery it contained.

"Very well. You may begin recording at any time."

Nate pulled the thin white envelope from its place nestled between the pages, and settled back in his chair, running a thumb over the inked letters. He cleared his throat.

"Canyon City, Yukon Territory. Nineteen-oh-two. Winter."

Here he paused, abruptly leaning forward over the desk to peer out through the door and into what he could see of the corridor beyond. All clear. He sat back again and resumed his "log."

"It's cold. Cold enough to stop a speedster in his tracks…."

Elsewhere on the Waverider, Jax put his hand on the bulkhead and poked his head into the kitchen. Empty. "Yo Gideon."

"Yes, Mr. Jackson?"

"You seen Nate anywhere? We're gonna hit up 1943 Chicago for the invention of the deep dish, wanna see if he's in."

There was a pause before Gideon answered. "Dr. Heywood is currently in the study recording a log of the artifact the team recovered from 1903. I can notify him of your plans, if you wish."

Jax crossed his arms, leaning back against the bulkhead in the kitchen doorway. "A log, huh? More of his sappy time traveler fanfiction?"

There was an even longer pause. Long enough to cause concern about Gideon's continued operation. But her voice eventually echoed down an answer. "Yes."

"That's cool," Jax shrugged. "Don't bother him on account of me. Just let me know when he's done, alright? I'm dying to see what happens next."


End file.
